


Dum Spiro Spero

by JoanofArc



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, and pre beyond?, but first suffering, i promise everything is gonna be fine in the end, idk man it's angst, jim and ny are the best of friends you can pry this headcanon from my cold dead hands, post beyond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-22
Updated: 2018-07-22
Packaged: 2019-06-14 15:16:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15391590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoanofArc/pseuds/JoanofArc
Summary: “No,” she repeats again, louder this time, her head shaking violently from side to side. “No, I can’t do this right now.” She shakes her head again for good measure, wraps her fingers around her wrist and squeezes so hard she feels the bones grind together. “Have a nice day, Commander.”





	Dum Spiro Spero

Time stands still. It stretches out, elastic, until she swears an eternity has passed in the space between one second and another. The air feels static, electric on her skin, like someone had set her entire nervous system on fire, and it spreads all across her being. Nyota can feel her lungs filling up with smoke, her chest tightening, and it is only after struggling to breathe for a moment that she realizes that all of it is a physiological reaction to shock. Or perhaps anxiety, with the way her heart seems to forget how to beat steadily and instead, hammers on at a speed that leaves her dizzy.

Spock either does not catch on or does not want to, because he continues, undeterred.

“—And it is my duty, as a member of an endangered species, to return to my people and aid them in the rebuilding efforts, along with the continuation of the Vulcan heredity, which would in turn ensure that the entire Vulcan race does not face extinction.”

_Ah_ , she realises with a start. Heartbreak. Complete and utter heartbreak.  The feeling in her chest, heavy and sickeningly sweet, like rotten honey.

Had she been in any other state, she would have noticed the way he is fidgeting, fingers clasped together and thumb rubbing over his knuckles, or how he cannot really look at her. She would have noticed the strain in his voice, the slouch in his posture, because she has always been so very good at reading him, at seeing past the surface layers, beyond the façade of Vulcan calm. She does not look at him, however. And she refuses to give in to the urge to cry, even as her eyes sting and her palms hurt where she has dug her nails into the flesh too hard.

“Nyota, you must understand—”

“No.” Her voice, strangely enough, does not shake. Spock flinches minutely, his hand hanging between them, an aborted half-motion and she will not see to completion, before dropping it back to his side.

“Nyota—”

“No,” she repeats again, louder this time, her head shaking violently from side to side. “No, I can’t do this right now.” She shakes her head again for good measure, wraps her fingers around her wrist and squeezes so hard she feels the bones grind together. “Have a nice day, Commander.”

Any other time, his title would be infused with the teasing lilt of her voice, with the shadow of a smile that is meant to be provocative and affectionate. Now, it is empty, harsh.

He does not try to stop her when she turns on her heels, a sharp pivot executed with perhaps more force than necessary. The pneumatic doors open with a hiss, loud and angry. He does not try to stop her as she walks out of his quarters, the cold air in the hall hitting her like a brick wall, not when she rushes to her own room. Her room, the one that has been deserted and empty since the Enterprise took off the second time, devoid of personal belongings.

She will have to go back there to get her things, she realises belatedly. Tomorrow, perhaps. Or the day after that.

The bed feels cold and empty when she falls into it, too numb to cry, too numb to do anything but stare at the ceiling. Her boots fall onto the floor with a dull thud, sharp in the silence and her uniform is uncomfortable, but she does not move to take it off, cannot do anything but curl up on herself, knees to her chest.

Nyota has dealt with bad break ups before. Has dealt with screaming and tears, with accusations fling at her. This should not be any different. It should not feel so gargantuan, monumental, like being ripped into two pieces. Except it does.

Except she spent five years of her life with him a constant, and the impersonal manner in which Spock had delivered his speech, while meant to somehow comfort her in a twisted kind of way, only made things worse. She thought she could read him well enough. That she could understand the subtle undertone in his words, that he loved her just as much, even when he never explicitly told her so.

Maybe she was wrong.

His mother’s pendant lays heavy across her skin, and the silver string chokes her up.

*

Jim knows something is wrong the moment Nyota requests the gamma shift two days in a row. She can see it in the way he drops his faux-flirtatious smile in favour of regarding her with unguarded concern. If this were years back, she would have been annoyed that he saw through her so easily. But that was before Nero. Before Khan.

“I’ve got some really good bourbon I’ll share with you if you promise not to tell Bones,” he says easily, because of course now it is different and now Nyota Uhura can see herself spending time with Jim Kirk and enjoying it.

He stuffs himself on the uncomfortable sofa in her quarters as if he belongs there, all blond hair and bright eyes and expert fingers pouring the liquor in two glasses and she thinks that maybe he does. She does not curl up next to him, no matter how much she wants the comfort, instead sitting prim and proper on the other end, fingers clasped in her lap.

“So,” Jim clears his throat, nudging her knee with his finger. It does not elicit any reaction and he tries again, harder this time, until she swats his hand away.

“So,” she repeats, closing her fingers around the glass. It is cold against her skin, already sweating and the amber liquid within reminds her of her grandfather’s study. Jim narrows his eyes at her, and it’s not Spock’s stare, it’s not his quiet scrutiny, but she shifts anyway.

“You gonna tell me why my best communication officer is taking graveyard shifts now?” He does not sugarcoat it, and she would appreciate it if it didn’t put her in the spotlight so quick. So she throws back the bourbon as a way to delay the inevitable, ignoring both the way it burns down her throat and his wolf-whistle.

“I thought my alcohol consumption skill wasn’t news for you, Kirk.” A raised eyebrow, to which he only replies by bursting into laughter. It draws her under, familiar and yet unfamiliar, to the point where she slumps against the arm of the sofa, draws her feet underneath her to get more comfortable. Or maybe it’s just the alcohol, which he is already pouring in her glass again.

“It’s not.” His hand is big and warm on her shoulder. He squeezes, once, before returning to nursing his own drink. “And for the record, you’re deflecting.”

“I—” She is. She has been deflecting for days, avoiding Spock at all cost and brushing off Christine’s concerns, taking her meals in her quarters because it is easier than facing everyone in the mess hall. It’s easier than she thought it would be, once she started drowning herself in work.

“Yeah, I know, I know, you’re fine, nothing is wrong. You’re gonna give me that bullshit and I’m gonna call you out on it and then you’ll have to tell me so we can cut the chase and—”

“Spock and I broke up.”

There is silence for a very long moment. Her fingers shift on the glass, thumb drawing senseless shapes into the condensation. She can hear his intake of a break, can feel his eyes burning on her skin, wide with shock. When she looks at him, his face is soft, his eyebrows drawn together in a frown.

“Don’t—” she starts, the word heavy on her tongue. Give me pity, perhaps. Or ask me why. Or just don’t in general, not when she is feeling so fragile and exposed all of a sudden, like he can look into her very soul.

“Are you… Is he— Uhura, I’m sorry.”

Again, Jim’s hand is on her shoulder and she is overwhelmed with the warmth of it, with the warmth in his voice. She draws her knees to her chest, presses her face between her knees. The tears haven’t come, not since Spock told her he was leaving, as if blocked by an invisible dam that has finally broken loose. And with it, she heaves her first sob, wrecking and painful.

“Hey, hey no, Uhura don’t… don’t cry…” Jim’s arm is around her in a second, the clacking of his glass onto the coffee table barely registering over the sound of her own heart breaking all over again. Nyota hates this, crying in front of anyone, showing any sign of weakness when she ought to be above it, but now that she has started, she cannot seem to stop.

He gathers her in his arms as one would a child, solid and soft altogether, his fingers in her hair, his voice in her ears. And she clings to him until she can’t cry anymore, until she stops shaking. She hasn’t cried in anyone’s arms like this since she was a little girl, but there is something cathartic in letting go, the stress and anguish of the past few years seemingly seeping out with her tears.

She wakes up with a headache, wrapped up in a blanket, makeup a mess, and still dressed in yesterday’s clothes. There’s a message on her padd from Jim, the blue light cutting through the quiet darkness of her room.

_Chocolate’s on me. You’re on gamma shifts until we reach Yorktown, Lieutenant. xoxo We should paint each other’s nails next time._

*

She cannot avoid Spock forever. She had known this, empirically. Despite the fact that the Enterprise is a big ship, there are generally not a lot of places to hide from the First Officer, and Nyota refuses to remain locked up in her room for the eight days until they are due to arrive at the Starbase. And regardless, her favourite earrings are still in his quarters, along with her padd on Cardassian hyperbole, little things she has left behind when she had removed her personal possessions while he was on shift. There is something strange about being there without him, and she had to stop herself from curling up with his sweater, from brushing her fingers over every little memory.

The irony is, she does not bump into him whilst in his cabin. When she reaches her room, arm full of little trinkets, he is waiting for her by the door. There is a cutting feeling in her chest, her lungs refuse to work at the sight of him, but she pushes past him, dumping everything on the coffee table. Jim’s glass and her own are still on there, half-empty and stale. She knows he can see the bottle next to the sofa, perhaps the only foreign object to disrupt the almost Spartan nature of the room.

“May I come in?” There is a careful undertone in his voice, even as he remains exactly where he had been waiting, and it makes her bristle.

“Will you make it an order if I refuse, Commander?”

He pauses, considering. The familiar crease appears between his brows and she needs to clasp her hands together behind her back to keep from reaching up and smoothing it out.

“No.” The furrow does not diminish. Her fingers twitch. “But I would appreciate the opportunity for us to discuss matters in a manner more private than the hallway.”

For exactly seventy two seconds, she entertains the idea of closing the door in his face. Surely, the satisfaction drawn from the action would drown out the guilt.

She does not. Instead, she gestures with her arm, signalling the sofa, but does not sit down when he does.

“I don’t know what you want us to talk about, Commander. I thought things were pretty clear. You were very thorough in your explanations.”

_Very thorough in telling me how you’re going to leave and marry someone and have hundreds of Vulcan babies_ , she adds to herself bitterly, but he sees through her anyway. Sometimes, like now, she can still feel him at the edge of her mind, a quiet, steady presence, and she wants it gone. She wants it to be over.

“It was not my intent to cause you unnecessary pain.” His voice is even again, so very careful, and she feels her anger raise.

“Not your—are you… you didn’t ‘intend’ to hurt me?! How did you expect me to react, Spock? What was I supposed to do? You were very straightforward in what your intent was. I don’t have to wait around while you explain to me, in great details, exactly what you’re going to do on New Vulcan and why! Is this all some sort of… of experiment in human psychology to you?” She is fuming now, all pent up anger and hurt, and his eyes are wide and sad when she meets his gaze. She feels like crying, but has cried enough. There is nothing left in her but the simmering rage, the flame of it licking at her skin, scorching his.

“Nyota, please. Allow me to—”

“God, Spock, no. No, you don’t get to tell me what the logical thing is, you don’t get to tell me how irrational I am being about this.” Her jaw hurts from gritting her teeth. She is relatively certain she will be left with permanent marks in the palms of her hand with how hard she is clawing at her own flesh. “You don’t get to tell me how I’m supposed to feel, because I’m human. I’m not one of your highly superior Vulcans, and I’m emotional. I’m not going to try to not be emotional because it makes you uncomfortable.”

He looks wounded. Like she had personally stabbed him in the chest and has been twisting the knife with each word, making him bleed more and more. He looks wounded, and it is such an odd expression on his face, uncharacteristically graphic, but it is not what she wants. She wants to satisfy that tiny part in her that urges her to be petty, to hurt him as much as he had hurt her, and yet she cannot do that either.

“I have never attempted to persuade you into behaving as anything but, however—”

“Get out.” Cutting, cold. Once upon a time, this had been the tone she had used when telling Kirk to get out of her room, or any other suitor Gaila had chosen to spend her night with. Now, it sounds almost just as hollow as she feels.

Spock responds in kind. Something behind his gaze falls shut, hardens, posture straightening. He stands to his full height, holding himself with careful deliberation. It is the stance he had been in when she first met him, all the years ago, when he had been preparing for the classroom. Cool detachment, that air superiority all Vulcans seem to employ.

How could she have thought that this would ever work between them? They are worlds apart, have been so for a very long time, the space between them stretched across millions of parsecs.

“Very well.” Had Nyota been anyone less, she would have scurried away under the cutting edge of his gaze. She stands her ground, despite petite posture, tilts her chin upwards in defiance. “I estimate that this marks the conclusion of our discussion, regardless of the fact that I have merely wished to convey my own take on the events.”

“As you have since this… discussion began, Commander. I see no need to insult my intelligence, or your own.”

A raised eyebrow. His, or hers, she cannot tell. Cannot comprehend what ending this means, cannot grasp the concept that there is nothing to be done about it. The finality of it all feels almost apocalyptic. How had she allowed herself to be dragged in so deep? She had been so very careful to guard her heart. Now it lays, tattered and broken, in the palm of his hand. And the worst of it all is the uncertainty that his had been in her possession to begin with.

“I trust the events that have transpired between you and I will not affect our working relationship for the rest of our time together, Lieutenant.” Crisp, curt, to the point. She steps aside so he can reach the door, where he pauses. Awaiting confirmation, she guesses.

“I hope your choices turn out to be satisfying, Commander.”

He does not hesitate after that, and the doors to her quarter close, leaving her in silence.

*

Anger simmers to nothing by the time they reach Yorktown. It is almost bittersweet, to know the last of their moments together will be spent in crisp coldness. Nyota tries to give him back his mother’s necklace, and his response is enough to melt away all the residual ice around her heart. She never takes it off—partly because she is awfully sentimental, and partly because she cannot bring herself to lock up such a precious object, to place it among her other jewellery, forgotten among her belongings. She and Jim never get to finish the bourbon, but he makes her promise him that they will at some point. She only tries to refuse out of habit.

And then Altamid happens, and Krall murders Syl in front of her. She thinks she dies a little then as well, a part of herself lost with every member of the crew that will never see their home again. 

Among the wreckage, shadowed by the fear of death, visceral and overbearing, she clings to him. He clings back just as tightly, an open wound at his side, a fierce look in his eyes she thought she would never get to see again.

They survive this, too.

(Part of Nyota wonders if they were supposed to.)

*

They don’t fall back together. It’s not as easy as that. She is still hurting and he is still trying to find his place in all this, but they are taking it slow. She is still afraid to give him her heart, clumsily stitched back together as it is, and he does not try to push her. In a way, it feels like they are back to those first days of togetherness, back when they had not truly known one another as people, and the air between them was tense with unspoken words.

The party stretches across the evening, and the night air is cold when it hits her skin, goosebumps blooming over her flesh that is not covered by the dress.

“You sure you don’t want to head back in?” Jim’s voice, to her left, is warm and slurred, and she turns to smile at him. It is a hard-earned smile, she knows, one she does not give freely, and he takes it with a grin on his own, reaches over to give her hand a small squeeze.

“I’m good, thanks. You should go have your fun, birthday boy. You more than deserve it.” 

Nyota resists reaching up to ruffle his hair, and then she doesn’t. Her little brothers always hated it when she did it to them, but Jim is positively glowing, and she laughs when he pretends to attempt to bite her fingers when they retreat.

“You promised me a chat over a glass of bourbon, Lieutenant. Don’t forget.”

And then he’s gone with a wink and a roguish grin. She watches him disappear behind glass doors and make a bee-like towards Leonard, swing an arm easily across the doctor’s shoulder and draw him into easy conversation. Her gaze swipes over the room, spies Pavel in a corner, Jaylah and Scotty discussing something animatedly a few steps away, Hikaru and his husband dancing drunkenly even farther. At long last, she returns her gaze to the night sky, fingers curling over the railing.

It is easy to sense his warmth. Spock runs hotter than anyone she has ever been with before, but there is comfort in his presence at her elbow, the crowd behind them loud and cheerful, the stars above them glistening in silence.

Nyota finds she has missed their silence the most. Shared moments stolen from busy schedules where they could just breathe together, let the galaxy slip around them, like fine grains of sand through their fingers laced together. She basks in it now, shoulder pressing into his arm, her eyes on the sky. Spock watches her silently, and when he lifts a hand to brush the very pads of his fingers across her cheek, she does not flinch away.

“What do you need?” His voice is low, soft, an echo to the words she had whispered to him what feels like years prior, in the wake of his mother’s death, of the destruction of his home planet. She smiles, turns her head to rest her mouth against his palm, curls her own fingers into the hem of his sweater, rubbing at the material between her thumb and forefinger. And then she lifts herself on the tips of her toes, hovering close to his mouth until he leans down to close in the distance. His lips are hot and dry against hers. His breath fans over her face, tickling at her cheek, beckoning her nearer. She has missed this too, she concedes. The careful calculation with which he kisses her, as if following a diagram, the exact pressure he exerts onto her skin to get her soft and pliant under his ministrations.

Time stands still. It stretches out, elastic, until she swears an eternity has passed in the space between one second and another. The air feels static, electric on her skin, like someone had set her entire nervous system on fire, and it spreads all across her being. His hands find her waist and hers brush through his hair, nails scrapping at the back where it is cut shorter. And it might take a while until they heal. It might take a while until she finds all the pieces of herself, until she allows him back into the cage of her ribs so wholly, but they have faced together Nero and Khan and Krall, they have survived and they have mourned, so maybe… maybe it is all worth it in the end.


End file.
